Arabian Dance
by labonsoirfemme
Summary: His daughter smiled at him and shook her head. "Daddy, you don't say 'good luck.' You tell me to break a leg." [In which Vegeta sees Bra dance for the first time.] [Rated for language]


Since Bra isn't a fighter and Vegeta does nothing but train all day, I had this crazy plot bunny of Bra having some ~mysterious~ extracurricular activity that Vegeta doesn't know/care about, until he's roped into seeing her perform, and he's like "holy shit, she's really good."

SORRY that a Voyage Long and Strange is taking forever and a day to update. It's not abandoned, just slow. Like, molasses slow.

Disclaimer: I am not a dancer, nor do I know anything about the dance world. Everything in here is from seeing a few ballets over the years and watching Step Up and its progeny. (Can't even shame me because I am not ashamed.)

* * *

"No."

Bulma set her hands on her hips. "Vegeta," she started, and then paused, pressing her lips together. She was clearly sorting through her words, trying to find the best sequence to keep this mild tiff from devolving into a full-on argument, which is why Vegeta decided to actually give her his full attention. It wasn't often that she actually took the time to think about what was about to come flying out of her mouth, after all, so he set his open book on his stomach, pages down, and clasped his hands on top of the spine. "It's a _very_ important event for Bra, and I think it's a good idea for you to be there."

His gut instinct was to tell Bulma that there was no way in hell that he was going to sit in the dark with three hundred humans for two hours when he could be training with Trunks, but he decided to return his wife's favor and think before he spoke. (This was a skill he'd cultivated as a boy, out of fear of Frieza, but gods – he'd never even imagined he'd have to do this shit after the fucker was _dead_.)

"I've never had to go to these…things before. It was our deal," Vegeta reminded her. He'd deal with Trunks' training, and Bulma would deal with Bra's activities. They'd overlapped at points, of course. Trunks was an adult, now, and involved with managing the family company with Bulma, and Bra may not be able to take any of the Z fighters in a serious fight, but Vegeta had made sure that she could hold her ground in a tussle. "Besides, you know that Trunks and I go out to the desert with Goten on Saturdays."

Crawling up the bed to sit by his hip, Bulma pulled her mouth to the side like she was about to tell him that they were out of sandwich bread. "Trunks told me that he's going to be there. Goten, too."

_What little __**shits**_, Vegeta fumed, huffing a breath out through his nose and closing his eyes to keep his temper in check. "When was this decision made? Did you have to brow-beat them into going, too?"

"Hey, now," Bulma said with a frown. "If you'd pull your head out of the dirt every once and a while, you might realize that your _children_ are actually pretty close these days. Once Bra hit eleven or twelve, Trunks realized that she wasn't a little baby anymore. She's the one that asked him and Goten, and they said yes. So don't think for a second that I'm some sort of puppet master turning your boys against you. And Bra wants you to be there, she just doesn't want to ask you and get shot down."

"She said that?" Vegeta asked before he could help himself, eyebrows pulling down over his nose. With a sigh, Bulma reached forward and smoothed her thumb between them. Her hands smelled like the lavender lotion she slathered herself in before bed most nights, and though he would _never_ admit it to her face, the scent actually was quite soothing.

(Bulma knew anyway. Bra's baby soap had been lavender-scented, and Vegeta had slept like a rock whenever her nightly bathing tasks had fallen to him.)

"It was more along the lines of, 'don't worry about it, I'm sure he'll be busy,' but she was pretty quiet about it for the rest of the car ride," Bulma admitted in a soft voice.

Well, _now_ he felt like shit. "What's so important this time around? It's just the company's winter production – they do it every year, and she's danced in it every year. And she didn't even get the part she wanted, right?"

Bulma shook her head. "She didn't. But she's fourteen, now, which means she's eligible to go to a dance school. When she's dancing this weekend, the front row is going to be filled with scouts from all the major arts and dancing schools."

"So…that's a big deal, then?"

Everything about Bra's "extracurriculars" had always been foreign to Vegeta. Since the girl was five years old, Bulma'd had her in piano and soccer and jazz, running her back and forth across the city. Soccer had been dropped pretty early on because she'd kept kicking the ball out of the park and that got hard to explain to the coaches after a few times, and jazz too, because Bra had cried every time she'd been dragged out of the house. Vegeta hadn't minded gymnastics, because he could watch her practice her flips through the windows of the gravity machine, but apparently she didn't have the "right body" for it. Too tall and too slim, according to Bulma. She'd started ballet at seven, and every thing else, save piano, had dropped away.

Ballet, though? All he knew was that it was some sort of dance, and that it required her to be present at "practice" pretty much every day. Between school and rehearsals for the winter show, Bra seemed to barely ever be home. He didn't even know that schools for ballet even existed, but from Bulma's tone of voice and the way she was nodding her head, they were indeed "a big deal."

Vegeta pulled his mouth to one side. "Does she want to go to one? Do you think she could get in?"

The smile that flitted across Bulma's face was one that he rarely saw: excited, hopeful, proud, with just an edge of nervousness around the corners of her mouth that kept it from pulling too wide. It was the same smile she wore when she told him she was pregnant with a girl; the same smile from when she'd gotten the phone call that she'd been nominated for the Newton Award for Engineering. "I think so," she said, clasping her hands in her lap. "Her instructors think so."

He never stood a chance against that smile. Something about it burrowed into the space behind his sternum and made his throat tight and his eyes burn. So he shrugged to loosen his chest and picked his book back up. "Fine," he agreed, and pretended to ignore Bulma when she squealed and kissed the corner of his mouth.

* * *

After Bra excused herself from the breakfast table Saturday morning, Bulma swatted at Vegeta with her napkin. "She's about to leave for rehearsal," Bulma hissed, narrowing her eyes at Vegeta like he was supposed to understand something.

"I know," he told her, slowly. "She mentioned that before she even sat down."

"Go wish her well," Bulma ordered, enunciating each word. Vegeta looked down at his plate, and then at the stack of pancakes still heaped in the middle of the table.

"I'm not finished."

Bulma picked up her knife and pointed it at him. "I swear to god, the pancakes will still be here. Now go say goodbye to your daughter."

_Gods give me patience with these women_. Vegeta took the stairs two at a time and stalked the length of the halls until he got to Bra's room. Her door stood ajar, and he knocked lightly before entering, like Bulma had told him to do once Bra got old enough to dress herself.

"Come in," Bra called, and Vegeta pushed the door all the way open. She was packing her bag on the bed – the same black duffel with the Capsule Corp logo on the side that she'd been using since she was a brat and still needed her mother's help to pack it. "Oh, Daddy – I thought it might be Mom."

They looked at each other for a moment, Vegeta hovering in the doorway and Bra standing by the bed with one hand resting on her coverlet. "Your mother told me to come wish you good luck."

His daughter smiled at him and shook her head. She'd had her long blue hair down at the table, but she'd pulled it back into a ponytail now, and Vegeta thought it made her look…very grown up. "Daddy, you don't say 'good luck.' You tell me to break a leg."

"What?" Vegeta spat out, eyebrows rising high on his forehead. "Why – why would I say that? You wouldn't be able to walk for weeks!"

Bra was laughing, so much so that she let her hip fall into the side of the mattress while she clutched at her stomach. "No, no, it's not like that," she gasped, wiping at the corners of her eyes. "It's actually bad luck to wish a dancer 'good luck.' It's so they aren't jinxed into giving a bad performance."

"That's bizarre and I refuse to say something so ridiculous," Vegeta told her in a flat tone. Thoroughly used to her father's idiosyncracies, Bra lifted a single shoulder and shrugged it off.

She turned back to the bed and slipped a pair of soft moccasins inside, then her brush and makeup bag. "You…are coming tonight, though, right?" Bulma hadn't been lying – she really did want him to come. He could hear it in her tight vocal cords, the way her heartbeat picked up right before she spoke.

"Yes. Your mother has told me that there are no words, so I'm sure she will have to whisper everything into my ear."

"Noooo. _Don't_ talk. It's so distracting. I think the scouts will be whispering but we can't do anything about that," Bra said, the corners of her mouth pulling down. "You'll get a program, and you can look it up online. It's _the Nutcracker._ It's a pretty famous ballet."

She'd finished packing, but instead of slinging the strap over her shoulder and leaving, she pushed the bag into the center of the bed and pulled one leg up to sit on the edge. She didn't have any socks on, like she normally did. The thick knitted things she loved to wear around the house were practically shoes in their own right. Vegeta realized that he hadn't actually _seen_ Bra's feet in a long time. The toes that weren't bandaged were knobby and slightly discolored, and her big toes tilted slightly inward towards the midline of her feet. Bra followed the line of his gaze and _tsk_-ed. "Pointe shoes," she said by way of explanation, but Vegeta had no idea what she was talking about, nor did he ask her to explain.

He cleared his throat instead and dragged his eyes up to her face again. "So…are you going to be in the whole thing?"

Bra shook her head and plucked at the seam of her leggings. "No. I only have one dance. I'm one of the Arabian Coffee dancers – Brolin is my partner. I'd wanted to be Clara or the Sugar Plum Fairy because they have the more traditional dances and they're kind of the 'stars' of the show, but…The Arabian Dance has great choreography. I just don't know if the scouts will think so, too."

Vegeta _tch_-ed and waved his hand. "Fuck that," he said, and a nervous laugh bubbled up out of Bra's chest at her father's language. He could see the nervousness in her eyes, though, and the last thing any fighter needed before going into a match was doubt. He stepped completely into the room and sat down on her piano bench. The piano itself was a big black thing with a ton of strings and a lid that seemed to actually serve some sort of purpose. Vegeta'd had to stare into the belly of it while she played one night before bed to understand how it even worked. He'd never gone to any of her piano recitals, either, but the day he'd asked Bra to tell her mother to set up some sort of speaker system so he could listen in the gravity room while she practiced, he'd seriously thought for a moment that her smile was going to break her face in two.

"'Traditional,' you said?" Vegeta asked, setting his forearms on his thighs. Bra nodded and pulled her other leg up from where it dangled to sit crosslegged on the bed. She looked slightly bewildered at the whole situation, what with Vegeta becoming increasingly hands-off in his parenting duties as she got older. He still chauferred her from point A to point B when Bulma was too wrapped up at work, but parent-child talks? That lay firmly in Bulma's field. "Fuck 'traditional.' Nothing about you is traditional anyway. You have _blue hair_, for god's sake. You lifted your mother's car onto two wheels last week because she lost her keys underneath it. Now – I know fuck all about dancing or what the hell you're even going to do at a dancing school all day but I do know that any scout worth his salt won't turn you down because you're not doing whatever is 'traditional.' Your dance – do you know it well?"

Bra pursed her lips and fixed him with a stare he recognized well from his own mirror (and from Bulma mimicking him in fights). "Of course I know it; I've been practicing for the past two months."

"Do you like it?"

"I _love_ it," she replied, almost before Vegeta had finished talking. Her voice, usually bubbling forth from the top of her throat, came from deep in her chest this time, barely held back by the tip of her tongue against her teeth with the _l_ sound. "It's been my favorite dance since I first saw it."

"Then the scouts will see it," he told her, pushing off of the bench, "and screw 'em if they don't."

Bra smiled brightly at him and slid off the bed, dragging the duffel behind her. "You have no idea what you're talking about, but I love you, anyways," she teased, but Vegeta could see that the tightness around her eyes had melted away.

"At the very least, relax your shoulders. You look like you're going to bounce through the ceiling at the first strange noise."

He walked her to the front door in silence and watched from the doorway as she tossed her bag in her friend's trunk and hopped into the passenger seat. On padded feet, Bulma came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his middle, pressing her lips against the back of his neck. "I thought you were going to finish your pancakes," she said against his skin, and Vegeta let out a disinterested grunt.

A thought occurred to him as he watched the blue sedan pull out onto the main road. "Have you been telling her to _break a fucking leg_ before each of these events?" he accused, turning around in the circle of her arms to peer down into Bulma's wide blue eyes.

"It's just a dance thing, Vegeta," she told him with a shrug.

Vegeta snorted and broke free of her arms to close the front door. _And they call __**me**__ barbaric._

* * *

Thank the gods for the programs that Bulma had picked up for them at the entrance because otherwise Vegeta would have been completely lost. With the front row of the audience filled with men and women holding clipboards and wielding furiously-scribbling pens, Vegeta could see why Bra would have wanted to be Clara. She was in most of the scenes, front and center, which means that she was front and center for the scouts too.

He finally understood why Bra's feet were calloused and discolored now, too. The shoes that the girls wore let them go up onto their toes, making a straight line from hip to toe. And he had no idea what he thought Bra might actually have been practicing, but he cursed himself for writing it off as some silly girlhood activity. Of course, he should have known. Bra was slim, but corded with muscles and possessing a freakish flexibility. The four of them sat in the upper balcony, but even from this distance, Vegeta could smell the perspiration and hear the pounding hearts of the performers.

The premise of the dance was ridiculous, of course, and only Bulma's nails through the material of his dress pants kept him from guffawing at the sight of male dancers dressed up like rats. So he kept his focus on the movements of the dancers, watching their feet flutter across the dance floor.

"This is the Sugar Plum Fairy," Bulma murmured into his ear as an auburn-haired girl in a glittering costume stepped out among the dancers. The scouts down front nodded and took notes, glancing up now and then to watch a twirl, a leap, a leg lift, and returning to their clip boards to scribble some more. The crowd applauded lightly as she twirled gaily away, arms spread out wide and gracefully, a truly fascinating thing to watch knowing that her entire weight was balanced on two toes.

Six "Spanish Dancers" danced in unison in brown dresses, sweeping the length and breadth of the floor with high leaps and fast twirls. The scouts seemed intrigued, heads tracking the movement of the dance, bending down to write, rising back up to find the dancers again.

Trunks elbowed him on his other side. "This is her," he said under his breath as the music changed. It was a silkier song, and Bra all but floated out onto the dance floor, swaying to it on the arm of her partner. When she began dancing, Vegeta finally understood what she meant when she said it was different from the other parts she'd wanted. Where the other dancers had been quick and flighty like the hummingbirds on the Capsule Corp grounds, Bra moved slowly, fluidly, sweeping each leg forward with a languid purpose. _Like coffee_, he finally realized, thinking about the swirls of steam that had twisted lazily upwards from the surface of his drink this morning.

She danced with one other person – Brolin, she'd called him. Together, they drifted across the stage in tandem, set in relief by the darkened set. The other dancers had worn skirts, but Bra was dressed in some sheer, red silk pants that caught the air as she leant backwards over Brolin's arm, fluttering her toes as they came off the ground. Brolin shifted her, lifted her high, then brought her down gently and held firm to her hand as she drifted backwards so _easily_ and _oh so slowly_ lifted her leg up towards the ceiling. The audience clapped, and Vegeta's eyes snapped downwards to see if the scouts had written that down.

But they weren't writing anything. They sat still and watched Bra dance, their pens grasped loosely between their fingers. Center stage, Bra braced her foot against Brolin's and shifted her hips back, gliding her back leg up, up, up, tugging hard against his hand (Vegeta could see the muscles in her arm and back working to hold onto him and stay balanced), until Vegeta was sure that her leg was going to pop off. But no, she held the overextension like it was a little warm-up stretch, sweeping her free arm up above her head like a lazy serpent, and then Brolin counterbalanced backwards to ease her out of it to the tune of a clapping audience.

Bulma slipped her hand into Vegeta's, squeezing tightly. "She looks so good," she breathed, eyes tracking Bra's gentle twirls and arm flourishes.

As soon as it began, it was over, and Bra was sliding a leg behind her to curtsy to the audience. Next to him, Bulma let out a shuddering sigh and pressed her forehead to Vegeta's shoulder. "I think it went well," she whispered, completely ignoring the entrance of the next set of dancers. "Don't you? Don't you think it went well?"

Vegeta rolled his eyes. "Of course it went well," he muttered. "They couldn't take their eyes off of her." The stage lights bounced off of Bulma's watery eyes and Vegeta let her kiss him, just once.

When it was all over (it might have just been a dream, how _original_) Bulma took his wrist and dragged him backstage. Half-costumed dancers and nondescript persons in black outfits and headsets ran all over the place. Vegeta recognized the backs of the scouts' heads as they cornered dancers here and there, and four or five of them clustered around a blue bun that Vegeta would know anywhere.

She seemed giddy, but overwhelmed, with wide eyes and an occasional quiver running through her limbs, like Vegeta got now and then after a good spar. So he let Bulma rush forward and envelop Bra in her arms, cutting her conversation short. As for his part, he let his face fall into a neutral expression bordering on a scowl when the scouts realized that the parents had arrived. Bulma had coached him on this, so when they gushed about how _talented_ and _beautiful_ Bra's dancing had been, he cocked a brow, said, "I've noticed," and held out his hands for the glossy brochures and business cards they dumped into them.

Once Bulma flitted off to collect Bra's things, leaving Vegeta and Bra alone, Vegeta handed over all the brochures. "Hide them before your mother starts making a decision chart."

She laughed, high and airy, and Vegeta could all but _hear_ the adrenaline and endorphins pumping through her veins. "There are more – Mrs. Myo has them, I think," she babbled, mostly to herself. After she'd left the stage, there had been enough time for her to change into her typical leggings and flimsy sweater, but white powder and heavy eyeliner still covered her face. "Hey, Daddy, I relaxed my shoulders," she told him after a moment, tilting her head to the side.

"Yes, you did," Vegeta noted, letting his lips quirk up in the corner. He saw Bulma heading back over, so he leaned forward and said, "Next time you're in one of these things, let me know."

_fin_

* * *

LOL SO FLUFFY. But Vegeta is whipped when it comes to Bra so it's practically canon.

Let me know what you think!


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